Homeland situation awareness through mining and fusing heterogeneous information from intelligence databases and field sensors

Abstract

One of the most felt issues in the defence domain is that of having huge quantities of data stored in databases and acquired from field sensors, without being able to infer information from them. Usually databases are continuously updated with observations, and are related to heterogeneous data. Deep and continuous analysis on data could mine useful correlations, explain relations existing among data and cue searches for further evidences. The solution to the problem addressed before seems to deal both with the domain of Data Mining and with the domain of high level Data Fusion, that is Situation Assessment, Threat Assessment and Process Refinement, also synthesised as Situation Awareness. The focus of this paper is the definition of an architecture for a system adopting data mining techniques to adaptively discover clusters of information and relation among them, to classify observations acquired and to use the model of knowledge and the classification derived in order to assess situations, threats and refine the search for evidences. Sources of information taken into account are those related to the intelligence domain, as IMINT, HUMINT, ELINT, COMINT and other non-conventional sources. The algorithms applied refer to not supervised and supervised classification for rule exploitation, and adaptively built Hidden Markov Model for situation and threat assessment.© (2012) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.